Mum hasn’t gone to Iceland

Have you heard of transactional memory? It’s the outsourcing of memory to other people around us. You don’t remember your nephew’s birthday because you know your other half will. You don’t need to remember to get the car MOT’d because you know your other half will. By outsourcing this way we can store much more than we can fit in our own heads.

Human beings have always been looking for ways to be more than our own biology allows. We’re a race of toolmakers, determined to turn every material we can find to our advantage. Whether it’s a stone axe or a smartphone, we’re keen to augment ourselves to be more than we could otherwise be. Do more than we could otherwise do.

This deep and ingrained comfort with transactional memory, and our own desire to augment ourselves, is why I think we will so happily accept AI extensions of our own selves. A transactional relationship with software agents that extend our memories, our processing power, and give us the ability to do what every busy person has always wanted: to be in two places at once.

Hold that thought.

For the time being, the biggest battleground in digital marketing is still search. What this means is people spending billions of pounds and using all sorts of sneaky means to ensure that when you type the relevant words into Google or Bing, theirs is the first brand that you see.

You may not think it, but Google and Bing are your friends here. Every day its engineers go to bat to make sure that what you see when you search is not what someone else wants you to see, but objectively the most relevant answer to your question.

On the other side though, every day, every brand’s agency is working to do the opposite. To ensure that whether you’re searching for car insurance or cat food, it’s their clients who appear right at the top of those search results.

Two sides locked in a constant battle.

Hold that thought.

Tell me: do you enjoy buying toilet paper? Really? Or tinned tomatoes? Or washing powder? All those things that make up a good chunk of your weekly shop. Things you really need, but honestly, do you really want? Do you lust after them? Are you fulfilled by finding that perfect pack of triple-ply?

What if you could have a transactional relationship with an artificial intelligence who ordered those things for you. Ensured that you never had to think about them again. They would always just be there. You would never run out of washing up liquid, or dog food, or nappies again. It has access to your credit card and an online store, and limited scope for discretionary spending against a list of key items.

Outsourcing plus tools.

Now imagine the battle that is going on behind the scenes. Today that battle is between marketing agencies and search engines. But what happens when you stop searching? When you allow an AI to do the searching for you? Imagine how much effort will go into influencing your AI to buy a particular brand. This is the next big battleground and there won’t be a single human on the front lines.

Personalised marketing engines will suck in huge amounts of data about you and your peers and serve endless offers at your AI, only for it to bat them back. 99% of them will be rejected. But every now and again, based on appealing to the criteria that your AI has been given, or learned, it will change your brand of toilet paper, cat food, shower gel, or, yes, cereal.

What might that data be? Let me give you some ideas.

For a start, we will all be wearing cameras on our heads, all the time. Your AI won’t just know what brands you buy, how much you use, and when you need more, it will know what your friends and family buy and use. People like you bought things like this? Imagine Amazon’s recommendation engine turned on its head and brought into the physical world.

Your smart glasses won’t just know what you ate elsewhere, they will know how much you enjoyed it. Heart rate monitors, breathing, galvanic skin response, even an EEG reading brain activity. All this is today’s technology the output of which can already be used to reliably interpret emotion by an AI. Sampled a different cereal elsewhere and liked it? You may find a box in your next order.

But only if it’s good for you. Your personal AI will know a lot about your health. We already pump data into systems like MyFitnessPal, recording our diets and streaming data from our Fitbits and connected scales. A few years ago I made a programme called ‘In the future, toilets will be our doctors’. I wasn’t kidding. You can learn a lot about what’s going on inside you by looking at what is coming out of you.

We are already on this journey. We have outsourced our memories to digital calendars. Our sense of direction to GPS.

We are increasingly comfortable with subscription-based shopping models for everything from films to food, razors to pants.

The future of retail — at least large chunks of FMCG — is automated. Decades of marketing to humans will increasingly be turned on the AIs that assist us, trying to game them into switching our brands. This is the new brand battleground.

Mum hasn’t gone to Iceland. Nor has dad. And they haven’t sent the kids. The AI has done the shopping and it has bought you exactly what you need.